Al Qaeda's Still a Major-League Threat

In a wide-ranging interview with the New Yorker published this week, President Obama defended his achievement in “decimating” al Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and played down the threat to the United States posed by jihadist groups claiming various degrees of affiliation and alliance with al Qaeda across the Arab world and Africa.

“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama told the New Yorker’s David Remnick.

He added: “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”

Remnick described the jayvee analogy as “uncharacteristically flip.”

Others may call it self-serving. While there is no doubt the United States has severely degraded al Qaeda’s capabilities in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, its affiliates and allies have grown in strength in many parts of the Arab world, have established a new safe haven in Syria, and could severely threaten the West in the future if they choose to. In fact, in terms of manpower, weaponry and territory, the broader al Qaeda network has never been stronger in the Arab world. Their struggles may be local for now, but there’s no guarantee they will stay that way.

The greatest threat is likely the 2,000 some extremists from Western Europe who have traveled to fight in Syria – an unprecedented number – arguably providing al Qaeda affiliates there with greater opportunities to attack the West than any part of the al Qaeda network has had since 9/11.

This is not primarily the fault of the Obama administration, though some argue its actions (or inaction) in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere have been partly to blame. It was Obama’s misfortune that the Abbottabad raid that killed bin Laden—the coup de grâce of a relentless drone campaign that wore down al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan—coincided with the Arab Spring, and a regional convulsion too powerful for even a superpower to control.

The events in Tahrir Square brought brief promise that al Qaeda’s currency of violence, which had already created a major backlash in the Muslim world, might forever be devalued, before political turmoil, civil war and the return of state repression provided the terrorist group and its various offshoots with opportunities to expand across the Arab world.

Bin Laden believed the Arab Spring had brought his ultimate goal of overturning the established political order in the Arab world and replacing it with hardline Islamist rule tantalizingly within reach. “I want to talk about the most important point in our modern history,” he wrote to one of his deputies in late April 2011, just six days before his death. “Things are strongly heading towards the exit of Muslims from being under the control of America.”

In the same letter bin Laden described how his operatives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region (what many analysts call “al Qaeda Central”) were clamoring to return to their home countries. A trickle soon turned into an exodus. Under his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri, a veteran Egyptian even more Arab-focused than bin Laden, the terrorist network shifted its center of gravity away from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region to the Arab world. Such brain drain may have taken more al Qaeda operatives off the battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan than even drone strikes. These seasoned fighters, together with veteran operatives released from jail in the early days of the Arab Spring, helped build up al Qaeda and its allies’ operations across the Arab world.

For example, Seifallah ben Hassine, the founder of the Tunisian Combatant group, a jihadist outfit closely affiliated with al Qaeda, created the Tunisian jihadist group Ansar al-Sharia after his release from jail during the Tunisian revolution. The United States suspects he masterminded a mob attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tunis on Sept. 14, 2012, and says his group is implicated in a number of recent terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings in Tunisian tourist resorts.

Syria is now a jihadist safe haven with two al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) spinoffs – ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra – in charge of large tracts of territory and at least twice as many fighters as AQI at the height of the Iraq insurgency. In Anbar province ISIS fighters once again control large parts of Fallujah and Ramadi. Both groups also have a growing presence in Lebanon.

In Yemen, AQAP remains a potent threat despite a tactical retreat from southern towns last year. Its leader, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, is as al Qaeda Central as they come. Not only was he one of bin Laden’s most trusted aides in Afghanistan, but last year he was appointed al Qaeda’s global number two by Zawahiri and his de facto successor. Electronic messages intercepted in the summer of 2013 between his camp and Zawahiri’s revealed the two men were coordinating a major plot against U.S. overseas interests. The U.S. government responded by closing more than 20 embassies across the Arab and Muslim world, which suggested a rather different evaluation of the terrorist network’s capability and reach than the one the president offered to the New Yorker.

In Egypt, repression against Islamists is encouraging the formation of terrorist cells, while in the Sinai region there has been a surge of attacks by jihadist groups who have declared allegiance to Zawahiri. In an ominous sign of what likely lies ahead, three explosions rocked Cairo Friday morning, killing at least five, including a vehicle suicide bombing at police headquarters that fit the signature of an al Qaeda-style attack.

In southern and eastern Libya, jihadist groups with growing ties to al Qaeda’s North African and Saharan franchises brazenly run training camps.

And from across the Arab world, an estimated 7000 men have made the journey to fight in Syria, where a jihadist melting pot is creating the terrorist networks of the future.

Obama rightly made the point that all of this has not yet translated into a greater threat to the U.S. homeland. For now, the overriding focus of these groups—and indeed Zawahiri—is toppling regimes in the Arab world and bringing in “Islamic” rule.

This is in sharp contrast to the previous priorities of al Qaeda Central. In the years before the Arab Spring, bin Laden pressed his deputies in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region to throw all available resources toward attacking the U.S. homeland and the home soil of its European allies. Al Qaeda operatives recruited Western extremists hoping to fight in Afghanistan and redirected them to launch attacks in their home countries, after teaching them how to build high explosives out of substances they could buy in home-improvement or beauty stores.

The leaders of al Qaeda’s affiliates in the Arab world do not for the time being see attacking the West as anywhere near as high a priority. Even AQAP, the al Qaeda affiliate that has most threatened the U.S. homeland, with three recent plots against U.S.-bound planes, has only dedicated a small fraction of its resources to launching international terrorist operations.

In Syria, ISIS has directed nearly all its energies to expanding the area it controls and imposing a brutal medieval version of Islamic law on Muslims it considers less pure. So deep is its animus towards non-Sunni Muslims that the group’s propaganda casts Iran as an even greater enemy than the United States. Its ideology is so hardline that it has increasingly clashed with other Islamist rebel forces, including the competing al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra. Zawahiri has looked on alarmed, but in spite of a message released Thursday calling for an end to infighting, he has been powerless to rein in the group.

Despite the fact that al Qaeda’s guns appear to be now turned homeward and inward in the Arab world, it would be wishful thinking to believe al Qaeda’s Arab affiliates will not in the future pose a threat to the West. Their senior ranks remain deeply convinced the United States is at war against Islam and is doing everything it can to block their dream of bringing “true” Islam to the Arab world, whether it is rushing weapons to Iraqi security forces in Anbar province or evincing what they perceive as strong support for Egypt’s new military dictatorship.

If al Qaeda’s affiliates in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere start losing ground, the dream of creating Islamic states fades, and if these leaders blame the United States they may lash out – and throw the kitchen sink at attacking the American homeland—just like bin Laden did on 9/11 after jihadists lost ground in the Middle East in the 1990s.

This process may be already under way. On Jan. 19 ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi blamed the “Jews and crusaders” for orchestrating the infighting between jihadist groups in Syria and issued a cryptic threat to the United States: “Very soon you will be in direct confrontation—you will be forced to do so Allah permitting.”

If Baghdadi, Wuhayshi and other leaders of al Qaeda affiliates start waking up every morning thinking about how to attack the United States like bin Laden did, the terrorist threat could eclipse anything seen since 9/11.

Al Qaeda’s affiliates in Syria already have all they need to create future carnage in Western capitals if they decide to pull the trigger: access to thousands of European passport holders who can travel without visas to the United States and experienced bomb-makers who can teach them how to build bombs out of components they can buy back home. Western intelligence services are scrambling to identify those who have traveled, but given the unprecedented numbers some will inevitably slip back to their home countries unnoticed.

Earlier this month, for example, the New York Times reported that Syrian extremist groups with ties to al Qaeda were trying to recruit American fighters to return home to attack the United States. British security officials believe it is inevitable that some of those returning from Syria will try to launch attacks when they get home. So far in January there have been more than a dozen terrorism arrests in the UK linked to Syria. Last month Richard Walton, the head of Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command, warned they had started to see signs of fighters being turned around to launch attacks in the UK. “I don’t think the public realizes the seriousness of the problem,” he said. “The penny hasn’t dropped. But Syria is a game-changer.”

It is far too early to declare victory in the war against al Qaeda, as State Department deputy spokesperson Marie Harf came perilously close to doing Thursday when discussing Zawahiri’s most recent tape: “[E]ssentially the entire leadership [of core al Qaeda has] been decimated by the U.S. counterterrorism efforts. He’s the only one left.”

In his State of the Union address next Tuesday, President Obama needs to prepare the American people for the challenges ahead. Al Qaeda is still a major-league threat.

Paul Cruickshank is CNN’s terrorism analyst and the editor of Al Qaeda, a five-volume collection of key scholarly research on the terrorist network published by Routledge in 2012. The views expressed in this article are his and his only.